Jason Segel Spends 10 Days with Cameron Diaz, Dreams of Miss Piggy

Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz. Courtesy of Columbia TriStar.In Bad Teacher, Jason Segel plays a pot-smoking gym teacher named Russell Gettis who is chronically amused at fellow teacher Elizabeth Halsey’s (Cameron Diaz) attempts to seduce the new substitute, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake). It’s a smaller role for Segel—what amounted to only a 10-day shoot for him—and in our conversation, it’s pretty obvious that his eyes are already focused on his Thanksgiving prize—the upcoming Muppet movie he stars in and co-wrote. We spoke about his role in this weekend’s raunchy middle-school comedy, whether his disgruntled feelings toward How I Met Your Mother have changed after a much better sixth season, and the attributes—we find out Segel’s favorite—of the original trilogy of Muppet movies: The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan.VF Daily:Are you in Michigan right now? You’re filming The Five-Year Engagement?Jason Segel: I was in Michigan. I just flew to New York to do Letterman and the premiere, and I’m headed back tonight.

Have you done Letterman before?

Yeah, a couple times. He’s really nice.

I’ve heard you don’t see him before the show starts.

Yeah, you don’t. But I actually like that. I prefer that. I like to get out there and see what happens.

In Bad Teacher, you get into a big argument defending Michael Jordan against LeBron James. Considering LeBron’s performance in the finals, that worked out well for you.

Yeah, that worked out, huh? I know. It’s really true. I had some real foresight there.

Your character, Russell Gettis, is the cool guy who just hangs out, occasionally taunts others, and smokes a lot of pot. Is this the closest thing we’ve seen on-screen to a non-working Jason Segel?

Oh, no. Non-working Jason Segel is much scarier. Yeah, playing with puppets, kind of writing bizarre musicals that will never get produced.

But you got The Muppets produced. Is that considered a musical?

It actually is a musical. There are 12 songs in it. I do a little singing and dancing—I Fred Astaire’d it a little bit.

Jake Kasdan directed Bad Teacher. You’ve known him a while, right? From Freaks and Geeks?

Yeah, he directed Freaks and Geeks.

When you’re on set and he’s giving you direction, do you ever stop and say, “Dude, your dad wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

[Laughs.] Yeah, we sort of got that out of our systems during the Freaks and Geeks stage. But, you know, the one thing that I do is stop every once in a while and we take a minute to acknowledge that we’ve all kind of grown up together. That show is coming up on 15 years ago, so it’s kind of remarkable that we’ve stuck around this long.

Does it seem that long?

You know yes and no. Sometimes, during my out-of-work period, time went very, very slowly. Now, being on a TV show for seven years, I can’t believe it’s been that long so quickly. It really varies, I guess, depending on what you’re doing. You know, I’ve been shooting this movie for three months and we leave Michigan on Thursday, and I can’t believe it went by so quickly.

I get the feeling that it’s weird for you doing press for Bad Teacher. You have a smaller role in this film, but your huge project is only a few months away.

You know, a tiny bit. This movie for me it’s funny, I really popped in and out. I was there for 10 days at most. And it’s the first thing I’ve done in a while that I didn’t write and produce, so it does have a slightly different feel. But it’s fun to play that role, also. You know, someone who is just coming in as the straight man for a few days. But, yeah, I’m very, very excited about Muppets coming out. Then this one I’m doing now, The Five-Year Engagement—I couldn’t be more excited about either.

Well, yeah, on my end, because you don’t have a lot of screen time, it’s not like I have a ton of questions like, “What was the motivation of your character?”

[Laughs.] Yeah! I really did just pop in and try to be the eyes and ears of the audience a little bit. A straight man, to some extent. I just came in and basically said what everybody else was thinking.

It seems you’re doing really well with the projects that you’re heavily involved in, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Why still do roles where that’s not the case? Like Gulliver’s Travels? Do you still have to take that kind of role at this point in your career?

I don’t really have to do anything. But I enjoy mixing it up. And for that one, the chance to do a kids’ movie was exciting to me. I had never really done one before, so it was neat to try it. But, you know, I think I hit my stride in that genre much better with Muppets and Despicable Me. But, you know it was fun. It was a fun process.

You’ve written a lot. Do you want to direct?

I’m not afraid to direct. But when I think about playing a role, right or wrong, I have to think no one can do this better than I can. You know? I might be mistaken, but that’s what I think going in. When I write something, I think: Nobody can write this material better than I could. But, again, that might not be true, but that’s what I think. When I think about directing, I think, you know, I know a few people who are friends of mine who could direct this better than I could. And that’s not the feeling that I want to go in with. So, if I ever read something or reached a point in my life where I felt like, “All right, no one can do what I’m about to do better than I can,” then I would do it. But I don’t feel I need to do it just for vanity’s sake. You know? To say, “I’ve directed something.”

I assume you’ve watched the original three Muppet films recently.

Oh, of course. Yeah, they’re on my regular rotation for a long time.

It’s amazing to look at some of the names of actors that are in The Muppet Movie. Next time I play Trivial Pursuit and the question “What do Orson Welles, Richard Pryor, and Jason Segel have in common?” comes up, I’ll know the answer.

There you go! Oh, absolutely. And they had a great lesson with the Charles Durning character and the Kermit confrontation at the end that sort of set a precedent that the Muppets are so nice, they didn’t even want to defeat Doc Hopper. They just wanted to teach him [laughs], you know, about being nice to people. That’s one of the things that is really special about the Muppets: their goal wasn’t just to beat him; it was just to show him the error of his ways.

See, that’s the thing a lot of people were assuming you were doing an ironic version.

Oh, yeah. A lot of people thought I was doing it with a “wink wink.” You know? And that wasn’t the case at all. But I think when people see the movie in November, I think they’ll be very pleased.

What’s your favorite of the original three Muppet films?

[Long pause.] You know, I love the original, but I like the pacing of The Muppets Take Manhattan a little better. But, I mean, they’re all so good. I mean, I could talk about this forever. But The Great Muppet Caper is interesting because it’s just a stand-alone story. They basically just played different characters. Kermit and Fozzy are playing twin brothers, which [laughs] is hilarious. I think the original The Muppet Movie has an amazing sweetness to it; it tells a great story of how they got together. But The Muppets Take Manhattan, with the Manhattan Melodies at the end, is the classic one for me.

See, my favorite is The Great Muppet Caper, for the reasons that you stated and because it’s the first one that I saw. Which one did you see first?

You know I can’t remember which I saw first. The Great Muppet Caper has the most specific story. I think there’s an appeal to that as well. It’s very linear: there’s a crook and they’re trying to catch him and all of that stuff. The first Muppet movie is totally meandering, but in a very, very pleasant way. And then the Manhattan Melodies in The Muppets Take Manhattan is a much more artsy one, you know? They’re putting on a play and all of that stuff. So, I don’t know, they each have their own appeal to me.

And The Great Muppet Caper has a lot of action-movie elements. Like the scene where Miss Piggy comes crashing through

With the motorcycle! Yeah, absolutely.

You’re six-foot-four. Has your height ever cost you a role?

Well, when you’re young and you’re trying to play the main guy’s son, at six-four, I’m not going to play Dustin Hoffman’s son. [Laughs.] So a lot of roles went out the window. But as I’ve gotten older and sort of hit more leading-man roles, it’s become fine. They can cast around me a little bit, so that’s nice.

Last year you made some comments that made it clear you weren’t particularly happy with How I Met Your Mother. Now that another season has gone by—a season that was much better than the previous—how are you feeling?

Yeah I was actually really pleased with how they wrote for our characters this season. They gave us some acting to do, which was really nice. So, yeah, I felt much happier. I had a storyline with Alyson [Hannigan] that really had a lot of depth, and the storyline with my father was terrific. So, yeah, it was a very nice year.